OK, so Microsoft launches the Zune officially tomorrow. News is starting to trickle out about just how screwed up the Zune concept really is.

I had already heard that Microsoft has agreed to pay Universal a fee for every player sold. Which is totally ludicrous. Why does Universal deserve a dime for the sale of a device that may never have Universal content on it?

Next in line is the fact that the DRM (Digital Rights Management, the technology that actually takes your rights away) that Microsoft has chosen to employ in the Zune eco-verse, is completely incompatible with prior versions of DRM that they’ve deployed in the past with Windows Media Player. Bought some tunes in the past thru Microsoft and want to play them on your brand new (ugly as sin) Zune? Out of luck. Buy it again.

And now we get to the one that will probably kill early adopters: Points. It appears as though when you go to the Zune store to purchase content, you don’t spend dollars, you buy points and then spend the points on the content. Not only does this completely obscure the actual price for the content you’re purchasing, but the math is set up in such a way that it’s very complicated to “zero” your account out. Which means either you’re going to leave money on the table (giving Microsoft more per content item than the price would indicate), or you’ll buy more and more points to be able to evenly spend everything in your account. Either way, you spend more money.

Couple all of that with the fact that the device is larger and uglier than an iPod and something tells me that this whole Zune thing is not going to catch on as fast as Microsoft thinks it will.

Windows Vista seems to be about as good as it’s predecessors at judging how long operations take…

OK, so I’ve had it with NameSecure.

A little “inside baseball” here… I own my own server, but co-locate the server at a hosting facility here in Dallas. I run my own services on it (www, mail, etc.) but do not run DNS (i.e. Bind) on it. Not out of the ordinary at all.

Until today at 9:30PM, I’ve had my DNS services hosted with a company called NameSecure (www.namesecure.com). For the past two years, they’ve been just fine. No hiccups, easy web interface to make changes, just peachy. In fact, they’ve worked so well for that, I even moved a handful of domains over to my account there, and paid up thru 2009 for their services.

A week or so ago, I agreed to host a personal site for a buddy of mine, and went over to NameSecure to add a new hostname to my business domain. When I committed the changes, I happened to notice that the page said that even though I had paid for the service, NameSecure was not the primary host for my DNS services for that domain. That was confusing in and of itself, but I knew something was up when after a couple of hours the new hostname wasn’t resolving. So I opened a support ticked saying essentially, “what’s up?”

Two days later, I receive a reply stating that NameSecure is not the Registrar of the domain. To which I replied: “I know, this has nothing to do with that, I simply wanted to update the parameters of the service I paid you to perform.” A little bit more lengthy than that, but you get the gist.

The next day I received a reply stating “We’re sorry you’re having problems with your mail service. We’re having technical difficulties, but we think the problem has been resolved already. Thanks.”

Geez. This has nothing to do with mail. And, no, the problem hasn’t been resolved. Another email off to support.

SIX days later I get a reply that states (I’m paraphrasing here) “Hmmm… seems like when you make changes, they’re not being pushed out to the rest of the Internet. Not sure what to do, so I’m going to escalate this to engineering.” Wow. What was your first clue? OK, escalation, that sounds good. Maybe someone with half a clue will take a look.

So that brings us up to today. Six additional days later. I get a message this morning at 7:35AM that my DNS zone files have been rebuilt and submitted to the zone controllers, which update on odd hours. This sounds good, I say to myself, and go on about my day.

About two hours later, I’m at a client’s office and I try to retrieve my email… only to find out that my powerbook can’t find the server. Hmmm… I drop out to the terminal and try to ping my box. No dice. I ping the IP address directly and it answers fine. I dig the domain for my server and see that now the nameservers aren’t serving any useful hosts for my domains. Great.

I immediately go to NameSecure’s website and attempt to locate a phone number. Nothing. My only means of communication with them is via a web support form. I fill out my support request, marking it as an emergency and shoot it into the ether. I then do a Google search for a phone number and turn up a 570 number. I call it and get a polite recording stating that they don’t take support calls any longer, followed by a click. Wonderful.

A couple hours pass and I haven’t heard word one from them. No call, and (of course) no email, since my server can’t be reached at this point. So I fire off web support ticket #2, this time using a gmail account as the return address. I get a email back from the system letting me know that someone will get to it as soon as possible, hopefully in the next 24 hours. Meanwhile, my server is unreachable.

By the end of the day, nothing word from NameSecure, so I fire one more urgent message at them, and then immediately locate a new DNS host. I had stuff going on tonight, so I couldn’t get back to the issue until I got home around 9:00, but 20 or so minutes later I had DNS hosting up and running at my new DNS host (DNSPark, and had Network Solutions pointing to their nameservers. By 11:00 everything is resolving perfectly and mail is starting to flow again.

And one click from their home page and I find not only a phone number, but a street address. Something tells me this is going to work out better. They even have a backup email service that takes over if your primary mail server is unreachable, queueing mail to be sent on down the line if your server temporarily goes down (or becomes unreachable).

Hopefully, if you tried to send me mail today, it’s queued up and will get to me eventually. If it bounced, please resend it.

And avoid NameSecure. My next step is to try to get my service fees back from them, but something tells me I’ll be unsuccessful.